When you hear people talk about how much the marijuana industry helps our local economy, you should remember that what’s “good for the economy,” these days, is really bad for you, our community, and the environment. Whether you build nuclear power-plants, frack for natural gas, make wine or produce black market marijuana, practically everything we do to pump-up the economy, destroys the environment, enslaves the community and kills people. The economy has simply gotten way too big.

After generations of mindlessly pumping-up the economy, we seem to have forgotten that the economy is supposed to serve our needs. Of course we need an economy of some sort, and up to a point, economic activity is a good thing. Up to a point, economic activity puts food on the table and keeps a roof over people’s heads. Up to a point, the rising tide of economic growth raises all boats, but beyond that point, economic growth becomes a tidal bore that destroys everything in its path. We have passed that point.

Look at us. We’ve gotten used to the violent crime, social problems and environmental devastation that come with the terrible racist injustice of the War on Drugs. We know it’s wrong, but now we’re afraid to let it go, because it might hurt the economy. We’d rather have dangerous violent criminals and homeless drug addicts on our streets, and let racist cops prey on people of color all over this country, than risk a possible downturn in the local economy. Could we possibly get any more depraved? …or stupid? What is so valuable about “the economy” that we’re willing to sacrifice our humanity, our community and our planet to protect it? Can’t you feel the economy tightening its grip on you, every day, wrapping its coils around you like a python and squeezing the life out of you? Why would you want to make it bigger?

Think about it. For the economy to grow, it has to get better at prying money out of your pocket. Think about how hard you have to work already, just to put food on the table and keep a roof over your head. If you have that much money, these days, you are doing OK, but how does it help you if those things cost three percent more next year?

If you have a little more money than that, you probably have a long list of stuff that you want to buy. It’s not like people don’t already like to spend money, or that there aren’t enough things to spend it on, but as the cost of housing and food goes up by three percent every year, the amount of other stuff you can afford, goes down, so that doesn’t really grow the economy. To keep the economy growing, you have to find ways to force people to spend more than they want to spend on things they can’t afford to do without.

That’s why the health care industry has become so critical to economic growth. As people weigh the costs and benefits of working longer hours vs eating lower quality food vs going homeless, their health suffers, whichever decision they make. Deteriorating health, then motivates people to work more hours, eat lower quality food or go without housing in order to afford expensive medications. These medications have a higher profit margin than either housing or food, and in many cases, people feel a stronger and more visceral need for them, than they do for other basic necessities. As people find themselves unable to afford wholesome food and adequate housing, those high profit margins on drugs that people can’t live without, keep the economy growing, but it sure doesn’t make life better for people.

Now that so many of us are already maxed-out, economically, it becomes more important than ever, if you want to grow the economy, that is, to exploit the failing health of every American, effectively, efficiently, and most of all, profitably. Moreover, food and housing must become less affordable, and attainable, so that more young, healthy, people, do without. That way, they get sick sooner, and become so desperate for drugs that they’ll sacrifice their homes and nutrition to the more upscale, luxury market, who can afford to pay more. That’s what economic growth has planned for you, so don’t get too excited about it.

Greed is a disease. It’s a sickness of the soul that destroys and consumes the people infected with it as surely as greedy people destroy and consume the community and environment around them. No matter how much they have, they still feel that lack, that missing something, that drives them to acquire more. For many, what they lack is self-respect, and all of the drug money in the world won’t buy that for them.

Whatever the cause, greedy people have a weakness of the spirit that makes them endlessly needy, but rather than treat them as though they need rehabilitation, we glorify that sickness, celebrate it, consider it a God-given right, and take pride in it as American citizens. Greed gave us President Donald Trump, nationally, and greed made us love the War on Drugs locally.

You cannot build strong communities with sick, weak, greedy people, and this economy makes us sicker, weaker and greedier every day. Everywhere I look, I see desperate people struggling to keep their heads above water, while they step over, and often kick their poor neighbors who have already gone under. Whether you are treading water, sinking, or have already hit bottom, the economy is where we are all going to drown if we don’t find a way to stop this disease.

When we care more about making the economy grow than we do about the people in our community, we have clearly lost our way. The greedy will always want more, and that desperation will destroy us all unless we stop it. Greed is a disease that preys upon the weak. The strong know that everything they need is available to them and have plenty to share. We need more strong people in our community, more than we need a strong economy.

To have strong people in our community, they need to be able to put food on their table and a roof over their head at a price that doesn’t make them work themselves to death, or do something they’re ashamed of. Thanks to the War on Drugs, we have entirely too many people around here who are all too eager to do things we should all be deeply ashamed of. Don’t let them contaminate your thinking with their sick, twisted logic. The economy isn’t helping you one bit, and anyone who says they are helping the economy, really means that they are helping the economy fuck you over. Don’t do anything to make it easier for them.

I noticed this image most recently in the North Coast Journal, but I’ve seen it, in one variation or another, in most of our local media outlets. Pretty much anytime the cops evict people from an “illegal” encampment, the press report appears beneath, or at least includes, a picture of a trash strewn field. We treat human beings like garbage. We force them into impossible conditions, harass them, abuse them, and then forcibly evict them. Then we show the picture of the trash strewn field, as though the purpose of the whole cruel, violent, unconscionable operation were to clean-up litter.

That picture is enough to incapacitate most liberals, who’s feeble minds freeze at the sight of it, caught in the cognitive dissonance between wanting to help the poor, and wanting to protect the environment. Liberals like to think that they are smarter than gun-toting, bible-thumping, immigrant-bashing red-neck conservatives, but they’re not, not by a long shot, and liberals fall for this stupidity every time.

Liberals watch well-fed, well-equipped and well-armed police officers forcibly evict the most wretched of the wretched from the most squalid of squalid, and treat them as though their condition amounted to criminal behavior, and the cops say “See, it’s not about the violent oppression of local citizens; it’s about cleaning up the environment.”

Liberals hear that and think, “Look at all that litter. That’s a real problem. I hate litterbugs.”

Fascists 1, People 0.

In truth, it’s worse than that. It’s about economic pressures forcing all of us into impossible situations. It’s about watching our neighbors crumble under the stress, and then stepping around them, and avoiding their gaze. It’s about looking around, and wondering “How did it come to this?”

“I know! You can tell. Look at that.” the guy would say, flipping to another picture, and then showing it to the person, adding, “Have you ever seen that much of anything come out of a dog.”

“Ewww” the person would say.

He mounted some of the pictures on poster-board and brought them to town meetings, and he regularly called our community radio station to tell us, angrily, always angrily, that those people living down on the river bar were ruining our community.

To be fair, the guy did clean-up a hell of a lot of garbage, and he did pay a some of the people living in these encampments to fill bags with garbage and clean-up the area. I know he cleaned-up a lot of trash, because he would leave impressively large piles of it along Redwood Dr. between Redway and Garberville. He used these massive pyramids of garbage as fund-raising tools, to solicit donations from passing motorists. A lot of people supported this man’s efforts with cash donations, even though he offered no accounting of how much money he raised, or how he spent it.

I cheered when he moved out of the area. He rubbed me the wrong way for three reasons: 1. He was always angry. 2. He blamed poor people. 3. His wife sold real estate, and he had a contract to clean-up foreclosed-on houses after the housing bubble burst. In other words, he and his wife, made money by making people homeless. Still, I felt sorry for him, in a way.

I could see that the guy was genuinely upset. He wasn’t happy. He looked like his head was about to explode. You could tell that it was more than he could take. He could not fathom the depth of the problem, and it all came out as displaced aggression. I can relate. It’s fucking brutal out there, and we’re all in over our heads. We’re all looking for someone to blame.

Democrats blame Republicans. Republicans blame immigrants, Muslims, women, liberals, the media, “welfare queens,” the poor, and anyone else they find, and all of those people blame the government. We all know it isn’t working, but we all blame different people for it. Our problems are much bigger than these petty quarrels. Much, much bigger.

Between those two ridiculous options, we have nothing. We know from statistics, that most people who live in Humboldt County cannot afford a home here. Either they spend more than they can afford on housing, skimping on necessities like food, medicine and utilities, while they work themselves to death, or they find themselves without housing and learn to survive that way.

They’re both shitty options, and I wouldn’t even call it a choice. More like, you try Option 1. You give it your best shot. If things don’t go well, you discover Option 2. Meanwhile, if you listen to the County Supes, the Eureka City Council, and their special consultant on homelessness for long, you realize that government will never solve this problem. In fact, the government exists specifically to create this problem, which is why there are cops out there evicting people from their squalid makeshift camps in the first place.

It’s not working. Government doesn’t work. Democracy doesn’t work. If you think the 2016 presidential election will change anything, you’re an idiot. Were you born yesterday? Don’t you remember all of that “Hope and Change” bullshit. Democracy doesn’t work. It never has. Stop believing in it. Stop teaching it to your children. In fact, stop having children, because you have nothing to teach them, and no future to offer them.

A hundred years ago, we built innovative new technologies that allowed us to exploit the Earth’s resources more efficiently. We built new mining equipment culminating in the giant drag-lines used in mountaintop removal coal mine operations. We developed new oil technologies, leading to innovations like the Deep Water Horizon deep sea oil drilling platform, and the latest craze sweeping the nation, “Fracking.” Inventions like the chainsaw literally changed the face of the Earth. Today, we see the disastrous consequences of the enormous success of these technologies all around us.

Right now, technology revolves around exploiting you, the user. How are they doing on that? Do you think there’s still room for improvement? Is there anything left of you? I wonder. No, technology won’t save you. There’s no “app” for that. We inhabit a culture that has run out of options. No one, sees any realistic hope that things will get better, and it only goes downhill from here. That’s the story.

When you see cops intimidating, harassing and evicting people who have nothing, and nowhere to go, you are looking at the end of civilization. You are watching the interests of capital, crush your neighbors last refuge, and pitch it into a dumpster. That picture shows the brutality of the system, and that’s the picture that tells the story.

When you see that debris strewn field, it means they missed the story completely. It’s like they went to cover the Superbowl, but the only picture we see is the empty stadium, strewn with beer cups and fast-food wrappers. Unless they wanted to remind us that sports fans are a bunch of drunken slobs, which is true of most of us, by the way, they missed the story.

We have a lot of free newspapers and magazines around here, and most of them are hardly worth the cover price. I pick up the North Coast Journal because they cover local arts, barely, but at least you can open the NCJ and read about a local artist, see who’s playing this week, and who is showing where for Arts Alive.

Lately, the NCJ seems to have undergone a complete talentectomy, and now appears to be written entirely by interns with the aid of the janitorial staff, so I find that fewer and fewer features in the NCJ get past my “dreck” filter.

I didn’t notice Thadeus Greenson’s piece until I was getting ready to recycle it, and I should have just sent it to the shredder, but it pissed me off that this guy would compare medical marijuana patients, sick people who need medicine, to oil company executives bent on destroying the earth to satisfy their pathological greed.

Anyway, the following letter appears in the latest edition of the NCJ

Dear Editor,

I just stumbled across Thadeus Greenson’s piece Behind the Brown Act in the May 8 edition of the NCJ. In that piece, Thadeus Greeenson compares local citizens, upset about a proposed ordinance that would prohibit them from growing their own medicine, to oil company executives bent on fracking.

In an effort to match this level of hyperbole I ask: “What If homeowners in Willow Creek were complaining about Jews, and the distinctive smell of gefilte fish, not to mention the impacts of visible Mezuzahs and Menorahs? Would the county be considering an ordinance to treat Jews like any other destructive, polluting and extractive industry?”

The ordinance in question would prohibit private citizens, living in residential neighborhoods, from producing the medicine they need. These people didn’t ask to get glaucoma, cancer, epilepsy or any number of other serious conditions. If the county won’t provide these people with free medical marijuana, the county should, at least, not bother patients who grow their own medicine, in their own yard, regardless of size.

Whether it’s lawn mower exhaust, toxic fumes from dryer vents, smoky barbecue grills, or trucks left idling in the driveway, suburban residents constantly assault each other with foul smelling clouds of toxic gas. If medical marijuana patients have to put up with their neighbor’s leaf blowers and dryer fumes, those neighbors can also tolerate the non-toxic smell of marijuana.

To stop medical marijuana patients from growing more than they need, and diverting the surplus into the black market, the obvious solution is complete legalization. Until then, we should understand why anyone involved with marijuana in any way, would be very cautious about revealing their identity, considering the long history of government persecution that marijuana users have endured, and the social prejudice against them that remains.

What People Say:

If you haven't read john hardin's blog before, prepare to be shocked. I always am. (I can't help but enjoy it though...at least when I'm not slapping my hands on my computer desk and yelling at him.) He's sort of a local Jon Stewart only his writing hurts more because it is so close to people and places I love. Kym Kemp
...about, On The Money, The Collapsing Middle Class
... I think he really nails it, the middle class is devolving back into the working class. Pretty brilliant, IMO. Juliet Buck, Vermont Commons http://www.vtcommons.org/blog/middle-class-or-first-world-subsistence
BLOGS WE WATCH: John Hardin’s humorous, inappropriate, and sometimes antisocial SoHum blog is a one-of-a-kind feast or famine breadline banquet telling it like it is—or at least how it is through Mr. Hardin’s uniquely original point of view with some off-the-wall poetic licensing and colorful pics tossed in for good measure. For example, how it all went from this to that and how it all came about like the hokey pokey with your right foot out. You get the idea. Caution: this isn’t for everybody, especially those without a bawdy, bawdry, and tacky sense of humor. You know who you are. We liked it. (From the Humboldt Sentinel http://humboldtsentinel.com/2011/12/16/weekly-roundup-for-december-16-2011/)